Irrational Games, nee 2K Boston, nee Looking Glass Studios, has a half-hour monthly podcast called Irrational Behavior. It consists of five to seven very short interview segments with various employees of the studio, not least among them Irrational impresario Ken Levine. As these are people who’ve had long careers at some of the more creative game studios around, their stories are uniformly interesting and frequently delivered with more than a little flair. The whole thing is nicely produced, with plenty of musical bumpers and narration by GFW/EGM alumnus Shawn Elliott to tie it all together.
Podcasts can be stuffed with filler or too topical to retain value in the future. At their worst, podcasts are little more than torrents of consciousness; unfiltered, meandering, and ultimately frustrating. Irrational Behavior avoids all of these traps, although probably at the cost of a more rapid publication schedule. The cast is slick, to the point, and satisfying. It is, of course, marketing, but it is also entertaining, and as long as you bear in mind what it is you are listening to, the fun can be safely sluiced out of the propaganda via various mechanisms within your brain.
You can find Irrational Behavior on the iTunes store, or get all of the episodes from the Irrational Games website here.
Crystal Dynamics’ global brand director Karl Stewart, for telling CVG in all earnestness:
“I think the model as we see it right now is a frail one. Having the used market is not beneficial to any of us.”
Which is a completely true and honest statement, for values of the word “us” that do not include the subset “customers”. Try to keep that in mind the next time you decide to sling flame online in the name of your favorite major game corporation.
This Project $10 thing from EA is starting to get a bit out of hand. I didn’t particularly care when it was just extra stuff like costumes and weapons that aren’t part of the core experience of a game; in fact, I thought it was a clever way to incentivize buying a new title. The new deal, where sports games will cost an extra $10 to play online if bought used, flips that all upside down. It’s taken what originally sounded like a reasonable proposal – here’s a nice present if you do things the way that’s good for us – and turns it into a muscle play. I can’t imagine nearly as many people are going to stick up for the “buy it new or it’s broken and you’ll pay to fix it” model as were willing to speak out in favor of new-game bonuses. We’re not far now from simply having console games that require a 1-time activation code – free with a new copy, $60 otherwise – to work at all. we’ve already taken the leap that gets us about halfway there.
There’s no two ways about it: this experiment with Shadow of the Colossus is not going well. I sit down to decide what to do with my evening, and as my glance strays towards the PS2, SotC disc slumbering away in its tray, I remember that I have Space Marines to paint. Episodes of Glee to watch. Dishes to wash. The catbox could use cleaning.
Apparently I don’t want to play this game anymore.
There’s a lot to like about Colossus, and I touched on some of it in the last podcast. It’s beautifully atmospheric. The designs of the colossi are interesting, and the puzzles are interesting to figure out and solve. I’m just looking for a bit more, I suppose.
Sonic Rob: oh fuck, we watched New Moon last night Sonic Rob: we thought it would be stupid, mindless laugh-at-the-movie fun Sonic Rob: it was fucking pain rendered in photons FyreHaar: dude FyreHaar: were you drunk? FyreHaar: I think you need to be drunk
FyreHaar: oh god Sonic Rob: or Squeeeeeee, I guess FyreHaar: ok that’s pretty good Sonic Rob: no seriously, that’s the name of their new label for mature rated titles Sonic Rob: which is hilarious, cause that’s one of the most immature names ever FyreHaar: Squee for mature audiences Sonic Rob: They should have called it Square Enix Black Steel Unleashed Riding a Sweet Dragon, Yo Continue reading What’s My Name: Game Studio Edition
Surely I can’t have been the only who, hearing that a downloadable survival horror game called Hydrophobia has been announced for later in the year, immediately assumed that it was a gritty reboot of Paperboy that followed the harrowing tale of a young cyclist bitten by an improperly restrained Rottweiler and his subsequent descent into rabies-induced madness? I mean, that’s the first thing that springs to mind, right?
After all, as we all know, the fear of water is called aquaphobia, so if the game was about scary things happening in water, they’d have called it that.
Is Josh Tyler’s review of The Backup Plan, the latest cliffside impact of Jennifer Lopez’ long, spastic plummet into the Canyon of Obsolescence:
The Back-up Plan is one of the ten most terrifying movie experiences of my life. The other nine movies on that list are a motley and varied assortment of everything from M. Night Shyamalan to Hitchcock, yet this one is in a class of its own. I can only assume from the bubble-gum pop blaring out of the theater’s speakers that it was director Alan Paul’s intention to create another one of those bland Jennifer Lopez romantic comedies which seem to do so well. But replace The Back-up Plan’s secretary rock score with music composed mostly of chillingly high-pitched string instruments and you’d have the scariest movie of the year.
That’s the dumbest paragraph in the review, and it still makes me giggle.
-ssr
[h/t Pajiba, which has also been nice enough to post Fyre’s review of The American Way of Death. See how I brought all that together? It’s like the circle of life. Hakuna Matata, bitches.]
I’m pretty amazingly not into the idea of the FPS “reboot” of X-COM. I didn’t play X-COM for its trite, skeletal story or its anonymous, disposable soldiers. I played for the nerve-wracking strategy and squad tactics. Making an FPS and calling it X-COM is like making a cel-shaded platformer and calling it NASCAR.
My best X-COM memories involve situations that I couldn’t predict, but could only learn from. The time a squaddie opened a farmhouse door and stood helpless, out of action points, while the alien on the other side shot him. The moment later in the fight when another soldier, who had saved up his action points, spotted the same alien through a window and gunned it down in return. The soldier who saw another unit member die right next to her and went berserk, firing a fusillade of Heavy cannon shots in every direction, killing almost the entire team.
In a modern FPS, all of these events would have to be scripted, coded in by programmers to be sure they happened the right way every time, just while the player happens to be looking at the affected soldiers. Every event in the game is right there in your hint book, on GameFAQS, in your memory from the last time you played. If the good folks at 2K Marin can find a way to inject the big-budget FPS genre with a healthy dose of X-COM-style unpredictability, God bless them and keep them. I haven’t seen anything like that yet from a game in the genre, though, and I’m not inclined to make pre-emptive excuses to justify this genre switch.
The gritty reboot of Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri is already in Alpha testing
I mean, I understand where they’re coming from. FPS are a big genre anymore, maybe the biggest depending on how you look at things. X-COM is a storied franchise that’s been sliding down a long, slow, sad decline for over a decade now. It might make sense to say “Hey, let’s try freshening things up with a gritty re-make, get all Casino Royale up in here.” Except that’s exactly what’s been going wrong with X-COM for year now. The first game was fun in a slightly weird, opaque way. The second game was really just the first one again with a different set of graphics and a vertical difficulty curve. The third game, Apocalypse, added a trendy but really unnecessary RTS element that wasn’t enjoyable, as well as some pretty dismal 3-D rendered graphics. After that came a shitty space fighter game and a bland 3rd person shooter game. Again and again, X-COM has been shoe-horned into the genre of the week in hoped that lightning will strike again, apparently without thought as to what actually made the first game good.
I’ll tell you what. You could make an FPS that hewed true to the stuff I played X-COM for, but it would involve the player character huddled behind the landing strut of a VTOL, choking on smoke grenades, and eventually dying in a hail of plasma fire and alien grenades, Modern Warfare style. Every mission. The soldiers in X-COM are fucking cannon fodder for most of the game; you can’t develop a story about how one of them super-heroically and single-handedly drives the alien menace from the world.
FyreHaar: the site is fucklered FyreHaar: I have no idea what to do Sonic Rob: greaaaaaat Sonic Rob: ok, let’s have a look at this FyreHaar: we can just delete it FyreHaar: and it will re-gen the correct way FyreHaar: but I’m leery of that Sonic Rob: I didn’t upload anything to our FTP, did you? FyreHaar: nope FyreHaar: it was a hack I think Sonic Rob: bah fuck Sonic Rob: are you logged into the site right now? FyreHaar: yes FyreHaar: we need to back up Sonic Rob: you can handle this as easily as I can FyreHaar: but that is besides the point FyreHaar: instruct me! Sonic Rob: you know as much as I do Sonic Rob: um Sonic Rob: hm FyreHaar: oh god FyreHaar: I really don’t know what to do FyreHaar: I will ask teh google Sonic Rob: ok FyreHaar: I’m going to backup FyreHaar: and then upgrade Sonic Rob: sounds good Sonic Rob: /fingercross FyreHaar: w00t!!!! FyreHaar: up! Sonic Rob: you win! FyreHaar: victory! Sonic Rob: take that, China! FyreHaar: or Russia or what have you!
It’s been noted elsewhere that I have a bit of a knack for picking out video games that my sister will enjoy. Honestly, it’s not that hard; she likes games that star remorseless murderers with firm butts. Fyre tries to reciprocate, bless her flame-wreathed little soul, and that’s how I came to own a copy of Sins of a Solar Empire, which is the most infuriating game I’ve played in probably the last five years.
I should have loved this game. I cannot front: I find the design appealing, the graphics are handsome, and the course of play is stimulating. There’s a lot that Sins gets just right, which makes it a damned shame that the few problems it has are total bunny-boilers for me.
